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Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Fate or chance? Does destiny exist or is everything random? Statistics can explain everything, right? Could you be happy with a number of different people or is there only "The One" for you? If there is just one person for everyone, is there a perfect time to meet that person and what happens if you meet them before you or they are ready? Questions like these come up very frequently when people talk about love and the answers can be debated indefinitely. In Kate Eberlen's new novel, Miss You, the main characters cross and recross each others' paths for years, never quite making the connection that brings them together. Does Fate keep bringing them together until she gets it right or are these chance encounters just that, chance? Tess and Gus are meant to be, or are they?

Tess and her best friend Doll are in Florence towards the end of their last vacation before Tess goes off to university. Gus is in Florence with his parents as they all face the sudden, shocking loss of his older brother. Tess and Gus run into each other in a beautiful, quiet church and then again on the street in Florence but they each go their own way, returning to the lives that each had planned. This may be the first time they come across each other, but it certainly won't be the last.

When Tess gets home, she is blindsided by the fact that her mother is very ill. Her five year old sister's care all falls to her and when their mother dies, Tess's dreams of university die with her. Someone has to be there to take care of Hope and that someone is Tess. Nothing about her life is the way she planned it. Meanwhile Gus is not in charge of his own life either, compelled to live up to a memory (one that perhaps isn't as honest as it should be) and choosing to train as a doctor because that's what his father wants for him and that's what his brother was doing. Like Tess's, his life is far from what he once dreamed and wanted. Both characters go along living their lives sometimes seeming to move towards each other and other times away. As they go about their daily lives, experiencing events major and minor, there are constant near misses between the two of them, times where they might have connected or met but didn't, times when they crossed each others' paths but didn't pause, times when their lives almost intersected but then didn't.

The novel is told in chapters alternating from Tess's first person perspective to Gus's first person perspective so neither of them know how close they occasionally come to meeting the other but the reader sees them slip past each other time after time after time. Spanning 16 years, the chapters sometimes jump in time, showing Tess and Gus at major decision points in their lives and giving the reader the general shape of their lives. But their lives are not parallel, nor are they combined except in the very beginning in Florence and when they finally meet in the end. For the majority of the novel, they live very separate lives, without any knowledge of each other and their situations. Both of them are damaged by their losses and face difficulties that reverberate throughout their lives and relationships. Gus always feels he's competing with his dead brother and coming up short. Tess not only becomes the primary caregiver to her sister, where things get even more complicated when their father essentially checks out after Hope is diagnosed with Asperger's, but she also lives with the fear of dying young of breast cancer just like her mother. Neither of the characters is entirely likable and Gus especially does some pretty reprehensible things but they are very real, the both of them.

The separateness of their two lives and therefore the two plot lines might cause some readers a bit of frustration but Eberlen seems to know just when to insert a near miss to remind the reader that while these two are currently living lives unknown to each other, they are in fact close enough to touch. Because of the first person narration, it can be hard to know the secondary characters and sometimes the reader needs to be reminded that these minor characters are being filtered through the main characters' eyes. After so many years of Tess and Gus passing like ships in the night, and in some ways that journey is everything, the ending feels rushed even if the reader knew that's where it was going all along. Leaving aside the predictable quickness of the ending, this is definitely a different and interesting take on the "what ifs" of life. A worthy addition to your beach bag for sure.

Amazon says this about the book: A beautifully written food memoir chronicling one woman’s journey from her rural Midwestern hometown to the intoxicating world of New York City fine dining—and back again—in search of her culinary roots

Before Amy Thielen frantically plated rings of truffled potatoes in some of New York City’s finest kitchens—for chefs David Bouley, Daniel Boulud, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten—she grew up in a northern Minnesota town home to the nation’s largest French fry factory, the headwaters of the fast food nation, with a mother whose generous cooking dripped with tenderness, drama, and an overabundance of butter.

Inspired by her grandmother’s tales of cooking in the family farmhouse, Thielen moves north with her artist husband to a rustic, off-the-grid cabin deep in the woods. There, standing at the stove three times a day, she finds the seed of a growing food obsession that leads her to the sensory madhouse of New York’s top haute cuisine brigades. But, like a magnet, the foods of her youth draw her back home, where she comes face to face with her past and a curious truth: that beneath every foie gras sauce lies a rural foundation of potatoes and onions.

Amy Thielen’s coming-of-age story pulses with energy, a cook’s eye for intimate detail, and a dose of dry Midwestern humor. Give a Girl a Knife offers a fresh, vivid view into New York’s high-end restaurants before returning Thielen to her roots, where she realizes that the marrow running through her bones is not demi-glace but gravy—thick with nostalgia and hard to resist.

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

How do you get past a lost love, especially one torn from you? In Julia London's newest novel, Hard-Hearted Highlander, the third in the Highland Grooms series after Wild Wicked Scot and Sinful Scottish Laird, both the hero and heroine are faced with going on after their first loves die.

Rabbie Mackenzie is angry, remote, and verging on suicidal. As a highlander after Culloden, he harbors a lot of anger toward the English for the atrocities they perpetrated on the Scots. The worst thing they did to him personally weat Avaline Kent, his fiancee, is naive, emotional, and childish and must rely on her lady's maid in almost all decisions. But Rabbie will grudgingly marry her to save his clan and keep her father, who has bought a neighboring estate, from destroying the Mackenzies through trade. For her part, Avaline can't say boo to a mouse, deferring to her maid Bernadette, a woman of noble birth whose youthful elopement and forced annulment ruined her reputation and her future prospects. When Bernadette and Rabbie meet, they dislike to each other, Rabbie thinking Bernadette feels she is better than him and Bernadette thinking Rabbie is insufferably rude. They may loathe each other, but they both recognize the terrible mismatch between the hard and forbidding Rabbie and the cake headed, fearful Avaline.

As Bernadette comes to know the perpetually glowering Rabbie better, to understand that he is hardened by grief, to sympathize with his obvious pain, and to peel back these layers of him to find the man underneath, she finds herself attracted to him just as he finds himself attracted to this cheeky, honest, and confident Sassenach. Bernadette is burdened by a terrible past loss just as Rabbie is but it changed her in very different ways. Instead of shutting herself off emotionally from everyone around her and railing against the injustice, she has picked herself up and gone on with her life, albeit a constrained life unlike one she once imagined for herself. Even though she looks to the future with a more optimistic outlook than Rabbie, she is still carrying the enormous sorrow of her past and letting it dictate her future. Both characters have to learn to temper their grief and start living again. The secondary characters here are nicely drawn. Avaline is infuriating and ridiculously dependent and then surprisingly stubborn and short-sighted, throwing up road blocks every time Bernadette thinks she has extricated the mismatched pair from the unwanted engagement. Rabbie's family is thoughtful and caring and although some of them are introduced in earlier books, a reader doesn't have to have read the prior novels to follow along and enjoy this one. Historical romance buffs, especially those with and interest in Scotland, will enjoy this glimpse into a romance set in the aftermath of Culloden and the impact it had on the Highlanders.

If you'd like to win a $50 gift card to celebrate the release of this book, enter here:

Monday, April 24, 2017

Short stories are very rarely my thing but occasionally a collection comes along that really works for me. Anne Leigh Parrish's Our Love Could Light the World was one such collection so I was pleased that she had another, although quite different sounding, collection out. Unlike her previous collection, the short pieces in By the Wayside are not interconnected stories but they do hang together thematically and beautifully.

The short stories here feel entirely complete in themselves. The characters are realistic and relatable and their lives are lives that her readers could be living. Each of the main characters of these succinct tales seems straightforward and yet turns out to have more depth and layers than the reader expects at the start. And sometimes this surprising depth is unveiled in a mere sentence. Parrish is, without a doubt, a skilled writer who manages to keep her work accessible (truly no small feat). Her stories are emotional and searching. They center around a female protagonist finding her voice, her power, her truth. Many of the stories address a reality of women's lives (love, professional disregard, adultery, depression, health, friendship and obsession, family and caretaking, sexual abuse, and more) but even in this universality, they manage to surprise without shocking, twisting just perfectly to highlight her characters' own agency. None of the stories is particularly long and because of the clear and simple language, you can zip through the collection in no time at all but you'll want to stop and savor Parrish's ability to surprise, her subtle one-liners, and the strong, impressive women emerging from each story.

Meet Me in the In-Between by Bella Pollen
All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg
The Island of Books by Dominique Fortier
Water From My Heart by Charles Martin
By the Wayside by Anne Leigh Parrish
Hard-Hearted Highlander by Julia London
Lights On, Rats Out by Cree LeFavour

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

A Well-Made Bed by Abby Frucht and Laurie Alberts
The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer
The Lake House by Kate Morton
Shelter by Jung Yun
The Center of the World by Jacqueline Sheehan
A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
The Last Time She Saw Him by Jane Haseldine
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
Paint Your Wife by Lloyd Jones
The Company They Kept edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein
No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal
Salt Houses by Hala Alyan

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

Exposure by Helen Dunmore
Eliza Waite by Ashley E. Sweeney
Nine Island by Jane Alison
I Hid My Voice by Parinoush Saniee
The Other Woman by Therese Bohman
The Florence Diary by Diana Athill
Seven Minutes in Heaven by Eloisa James
The Mortifications by Derek Palacio
The Young Widower's Handbook by Tom McAllister
The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd
The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do But You Could've Done Better by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell
To Love the Coming End by Leanne Dunic
Make Trouble by John Waters
The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman by Denis Theriault
A Loving, Faithful Animal by Josephine Rowe
City Mouse by Stacey Lender
Cutting Back by Leslie Buck
Siracusa by Delia Ephron
The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress by Ariel Lawhon
A Narrow Bridge by J.J. Gersher
The Never-Open Desert Diner by James Anderson
The Heart of Henry Quantum by Pepper Harding
The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler
The Vicar's Daughter by Josi S. Kilpack
Dance of the Jakaranda by Peter Kimani
How to Survive a Summer by Nick White
Bramton Wick by Elizabeth Fair
The Finishing School by Joanna Goodman
Meet Me in the In-Between by Bella Pollen
All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg
The Island of Books by Dominique Fortier
Water From My Heart by Charles Martin
By the Wayside by Anne Leigh Parrish
Hard-Hearted Highlander by Julia London
Lights On, Rats Out by Cree LeFavour

The mailbox has been crammed full with submissions for National Reading Group Month for the past few months but I can't share those with you. What I can do, is share the ridiculous amount of bounty from other sources that I've gotten in the past two weeks so you can wish you were me. (Any bookshelf builders out there?) This past two weeks' mailbox arrivals:

How could you not want to read a novel about three older women who run away to Greece for a year to escape their grandchildren only to have people, including children and grandchildren, start showing up in their retreat? Sounds hilarious and perfect for the summer!

I could totally jump on this bike and head off no matter what the book is about! That it is about a summer house perched precariously above the sea, the guest book from the house, and the generations of women who have lived there makes this completely enticing.

I really enjoyed a previous novel of Monninger's so I'm looking forward to this one about a girl traveling around Europe and falling in love with a fellow American who is traveling around Europe following his grandfather's old journals.

The idea of a mom with two college aged children starting over as class mom for her kindergartner fills me with an inexplicable amount of joy (mostly that it's not me!) so I am definitely looking forward to reading this novel of motherhood and parental politics.

Any book that has a tapper in it will likely have my attention and this one set in the dance world in NY about a man still grieving his husband's death but tentatively moving on definitely fits that category.

Just the title alone would attract me to this one! But I am also very curious to see how a woman who retreats into romance novels (and one in particular) goes about life when she is forced to face it head on and it isn't like a romance novel.

The short time between the world wars has always interested me and this one about a plain but wealthy woman who proposes marriage to an editor in her father's publishing company, not yet aware she is pregnant with another man's baby or of the terribly sad fate she is soon to face sounds really, really good.

Sunday, April 23, 2017

I have always found spring to be the busiest time. When my kids were smaller, it felt like the hamster on the wheel was in a full on sprint once spring arrived. Now that they are older and I don't have to add in as many of their activities and such, my spring doesn't seem to have gotten much (any?) more relaxed. I still have more things to do than time to do them in. Some things can't be ignored, like the youngest's last track practice (this past week) or moving the older two out of college (next week). Some things feel like they are necessary (weeding, pruning, planting flowers and herbs, the annual garage clean-up) before it gets too hot. Some things (all of the surprisingly time consuming administrative stuff for my Great Group Reads panel) are on a tight timeline that cannot be adjusted. Don't forget the one-time time-suckers, like sitting at the DMV to get the youngest his driver's permit or taking the car into the body shop to repair the oops I did one day. And I haven't even mentioned trying to stay connected to friends (which for me, as an extreme introvert, can be a chore but one I know I need to do for my own mental health). All of these other things war with my desire to just bask in the sun with a book. Today though, today is not sunny.

So on this soggy, wet Sunday, I will take advantage of the fact that pretty much everything besides sitting on the couch and reading is out of the question. The world is washed clean and green and I can luxuriate in a lazy, book-filled day. Some spring days are still as out of control as a squirrel on drugs and others, like today, are just bliss. I'll take more bliss, please.

Amazon says this about the book: This wasn't the way Beck Throckmorton had planned it. She wasn't expecting to find herself in her thirties writing erotica and making flat whites for a living while she stewed over that fact that her ex had wound up with her sister. She never saw herself living in a small suburban Ohio town with an octogenarian neighbor best friend. And she definitely wouldn't have imagined the eight-year-old great-granddaughter of that friend turning her world upside down.

As summer comes around, Beck's life is unsettled in every way. And that's before the crazy stuff starts: the sister taunting her with her pregnancy, the infuriatingly perfect boyfriend, the multiple trips to the emergency room. The needy, wise-beyond-her-years little girl finding places in her heart that Beck didn't even know existed.

Beck has found herself at an emotional intersection she never anticipated. And now it's time to cross the street.

CROSSING THE STREET is a funny, touching novel that brims life's complexities. Filled with characters both distinctive and welcomingly familiar, it is a story that will entertain and enlighten.

Amazon says this about the book: International bestseller Jill Mansell weaves a heartwarming tale of love, family and friendship in her latest novel

1. A brief encounter that could have become so much more...if only everything were different
2. Step-sisters, bitter rivals in every area except one―by unbreakable pact neither will ever steal a man from the other
3. A love triangle that starts out as a mess of secrets and mix-ups, and only gets worse from there

Plus!
Friendship, family ties, crossed wires and self-discovery, second chances and first impressions

Welcome to Jill Mansell's blustery seaside world. Once you step inside, you'll never want to leave!

Monday, April 10, 2017

Dance of the Jakaranda by Peter Kimani
How to Survive a Summer by Nick White
Bramton Wick by Elizabeth Fair
The Finishing School by Joanna Goodman

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

A Well-Made Bed by Abby Frucht and Laurie Alberts
The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer
The Lake House by Kate Morton
Shelter by Jung Yun
The Center of the World by Jacqueline Sheehan
A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
The Last Time She Saw Him by Jane Haseldine
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
Paint Your Wife by Lloyd Jones
The Company They Kept edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein
No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal
Water From My Heart by Charles Martin
Meet Me in the In-Between by Bella Pollen

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

Exposure by Helen Dunmore
Eliza Waite by Ashley E. Sweeney
Nine Island by Jane Alison
I Hid My Voice by Parinoush Saniee
The Other Woman by Therese Bohman
The Florence Diary by Diana Athill
Seven Minutes in Heaven by Eloisa James
The Mortifications by Derek Palacio
The Young Widower's Handbook by Tom McAllister
The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd
The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do But You Could've Done Better by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell
To Love the Coming End by Leanne Dunic
Make Trouble by John Waters
The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman by Denis Theriault
A Loving, Faithful Animal by Josephine Rowe
City Mouse by Stacey Lender
Cutting Back by Leslie Buck
Siracusa by Delia Ephron
The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress by Ariel Lawhon
A Narrow Bridge by J.J. Gersher
The Never-Open Desert Diner by James Anderson
The Heart of Henry Quantum by Pepper Harding
The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler
The Vicar's Daughter by Josi S. Kilpack
Dance of the Jakaranda by Peter Kimani
How to Survive a Summer by Nick White
Bramton Wick by Elizabeth Fair
The Finishing School by Joanna Goodman

I just learned that Mackail is Angela Thirkell's brother and I do so like her writing but this novel about newly weds trying to learn to economize would have appealed even without the family connection.

Amazon says this about the book: In the spirit of Khaled Hosseini, Nadia Hashimi and Shilpi Somaya Gowda comes this powerful debut from a talented new voice—a sweeping, emotional journey of two childhood friends in Mumbai, India, whose lives converge only to change forever one fateful night.

India, 1986: Mukta, a ten-year-old village girl from the lower caste Yellama cult has come of age and must fulfill her destiny of becoming a temple prostitute, as her mother and grandmother did before her. In an attempt to escape her fate, Mukta is sent to be a house girl for an upper-middle class family in Mumbai. There she discovers a friend in the daughter of the family, high spirited eight-year-old Tara, who helps her recover from the wounds of her past. Tara introduces Mukta to an entirely different world—one of ice cream, reading, and a friendship that soon becomes a sisterhood.

But one night in 1993, Mukta is kidnapped from Tara’s family home and disappears. Shortly thereafter, Tara and her father move to America. A new life in Los Angeles awaits them but Tara never recovers from the loss of her best friend, or stops wondering if she was somehow responsible for Mukta's abduction.

Eleven years later, Tara, now an adult, returns to India determined to find Mukta. As her search takes her into the brutal underground world of human trafficking, Tara begins to uncover long-buried secrets in her own family that might explain what happened to Mukta—and why she came to live with Tara’s family in the first place.

Moving from a traditional Indian village to the bustling modern metropolis of Mumbai, to Los Angeles and back again, this is a heartbreaking and beautiful portrait of an unlikely friendship—a story of love, betrayal, and, ultimately, redemption.

Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Sometimes I look at my daily life and think I live a very mundane existence. And that's why I read, to have experiences I'd never have, to be people I'll never be, to live lives far different from mine. Most of the time this works and I can slip into the skin of the characters or into the place or defining situation or a novel. But sometimes, just sometimes, I cannot make the leap. I cannot find a way into a character. Perhaps my very mundanity betrays me. And that leads to a very frustrating reading experience. Unfortunately, Caitriona Lally's Eggshells was one of those experiences for me.

Vivian lives alone in the house she's inherited from her great aunt. She collects chairs, glares at the urn containing her great aunt's ashes, and frequently sniffs things to see if they've acquired her "meaty" scent yet (she's not big on hygiene). Her sister, also named Vivian, doesn't have much to do with her, clearly wanting to protect her children from their off-kilter aunt. Our main character Vivian actively avoids the neighbors but posts flyers on trees advertising for a friend named Penelope (the balance between consonants and vowels in the name is just right), cultivates a jungle of a front garden to encourage mice to move in, and walks all over Dublin looking for the portal she's convinced will send her back to fairy land, believing that she's a changeling. So you might say that she's a bit of an odd duck, an eccentric. Or you might wonder if she's so neuro-atypical that there is something more going on with her. She's an odd mix of amazingly insightful and strangely ignorant. There are textual hints that Vivian has been damaged in some way, especially by her father, but there's only a whisper of that, and only two or three brief times at that.

Vivian's character is sometimes fanciful and other times just weird. Her obsession with smelling herself and wanting her unwashed scent on everything is almost animalistic and the repetition of the same adjectives to describe this tick becomes tedious throughout the novel. Her interactions with others, almost none of whom play any sort of real major role in the novel, are telling and allow the reader to see how she is viewed in general. She's clearly considered batty, not quite right. She is definitely childlike, operating most days on a whim. Appropriate social interactions are certainly a struggle for her. And so she goes about her days walking different routes around the city, trying to get back to the fairy world she's been looking for her whole life. The structure of her days is made up on the fly and only makes sense to her. These daily perambulations are broken up by a couple of small events, her uncomfortable meetings with Penelope, a woman almost as odd as Vivian; an unsolicited and unwelcome visit to her sister's family; and their rather unsuccessful return visit to her (she, however, considers it a success because "only 50 percent of the guests left in tears").

Other readers have found Vivian charming and whimsical. I fear I am more like her annoyed older sister. She made me nuts. I wanted to get social services to intervene so that she had someone looking after her. And in the name of all that is holy, I wanted her to stop sniffing herself and take a bath. There was very little plot to the book to distract me from the fact that I wasn't enjoying spending time with this character either. Lally is obviously a talented writer given her beautiful turns of phrase and descriptive skill but she needed more than just a character who thought she was a changeling to hang a story on. As a starting concept, it was intriguing, but without a well-developed story around it, this feels like one long character exposition, not a fully fleshed out tale. I really wanted to be able to slip into Vivian's world. I just couldn't.

For more information about Caitriona Lally and the book, check out her publisher's website as she doesn't do much social media. You can poke through her retired Twitter account too if you wish. Check out the book's Goodreads page, follow the rest of the blog tour, or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

Thanks to Lisa from TLC Book Tours and Melville House for sending me a copy of this book to review.

Monday, April 3, 2017

A very slow week for me. Not entirely sure why but disappointing for sure. This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this past week are:

Eggshells by Caitriona Lally

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

A Well-Made Bed by Abby Frucht and Laurie Alberts
The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer
The Lake House by Kate Morton
Shelter by Jung Yun
The Center of the World by Jacqueline Sheehan
A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
The Last Time She Saw Him by Jane Haseldine
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
Paint Your Wife by Lloyd Jones
The Company They Kept edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein
No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal
Dance of the Jakaranda by Peter Kimoni

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

Exposure by Helen Dunmore
Eliza Waite by Ashley E. Sweeney
Nine Island by Jane Alison
I Hid My Voice by Parinoush Saniee
The Other Woman by Therese Bohman
The Florence Diary by Diana Athill
Seven Minutes in Heaven by Eloisa James
The Mortifications by Derek Palacio
The Young Widower's Handbook by Tom McAllister
The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd
The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do But You Could've Done Better by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell
To Love the Coming End by Leanne Dunic
Make Trouble by John Waters
The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman by Denis Theriault
A Loving, Faithful Animal by Josephine Rowe
City Mouse by Stacey Lender
Cutting Back by Leslie Buck
Siracusa by Delia Ephron
The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress by Ariel Lawhon
A Narrow Bridge by J.J. Gersher
The Never-Open Desert Diner by James Anderson
The Heart of Henry Quantum by Pepper Harding
The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler
The Vicar's Daughter by Josi S. Kilpack
Eggshells by Caitriona Lally

Eloisa James recommended this contemporary romance on Litsy and it sounds light and appealing, especially as we're heading into summer (especially here in the South where we get summer less than five seconds after we get spring).

About Me

A voracious reader, fledgling runner, and full time kiddie chauffeur.
If anyone out there wants to send me books for review (oh please don't fro me in that briar patch!), you can contact me at whitreidsmama (at) yahoo (dot) com. If you do write me there, put the blog name in the subject line or I'm liable to send the unread message to spam. My book review policy can be found here.